


Cruel and Unusual Isolation

by MagicBerry



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Angst, Apocalypse, Gen, Nightmares, Punishment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-04
Updated: 2020-11-04
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:00:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27389857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagicBerry/pseuds/MagicBerry
Summary: Five times The Handler sends Five back to the apocalypse and one time she didn’t.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 49





	Cruel and Unusual Isolation

The first time the Handler returned him to the apocalypse was when Five refused to kill. It was a seven year old. His mom played some role in WWI, but her son needed to die in order for it to happen.

He was with his mother on a high bridge above a large body of water. When the woman took her eyes off her son, the boy climbed on top the edge of the bridge. That was when Number Five was meant to take the shot. The bullet wouldn’t hit anyone, but it would be close enough to scare the kid and make him lose balance.

He would fall. He would drown. He would die. His mother would contribute to the war and fulfill whatever duty she had to. It was simple.

The target danced atop the edge with a toy plane high in his hand. _‘He’s so young.’_ Five pointed his gun at the child. His fingers stayed in place. The Boy hesitated to shoot and the child lived. The Handler sent him to the apocalypse as punishment.

* * *

Five doesn’t remember the second time very well. He knows that the Handler wanted him to go through some experimental procedure. He knows that he refused. He remembers them arguing. He remembers her hands, cold and tight around his wrist as she grabbed her briefcase. He remembers what she said.

“I’ll come back when you agree to it.”

She abandons him for a month.

When he returns to the Commission he’s in and out of consciousness on an operating table. He remembers the doctors hovering over him. He remembers the lack of synesthesia. He remembers a bright light blinding him and the cold scalpel poking his insides. He remembers wanting to scream and push the doctors away. Wanting to kill every last person there for keeping him from his family.

He doesn’t remember what they did to him.

* * *

The Handler propositioned him one evening. No promises of anything. Just touched his person a lot and told him where her hotel room was.

He knew what she wanted from him. He wasn’t interested. It’s unprofessional and they were working. The target was meant to be killed the next day. Early. He stays in his own room and drinks himself to sleep.

Five wakes up to the sun shining down on him on a mountain of ruins.

* * *

He was “asking too many questions” about the apocalypse the next time. A Commission worker mentioned his brother and the apocalypse in the same statement. They said _Hargreeves_ . They said it correlated with the _End_.

Five just needed to know what happened.

He found himself back at the destroyed Academy after prodding (and threatening) one too many assassins. Someone must’ve complained because here he was again. The debris, the dust, the smell and everything else was as suffocating as he remembered. His family’s bodies have all been moved, but he could still see them buried. Crushed by their fallen home.

The Boy clutched the eye in his pocket. “You’ll save them,” he tells himself. She couldn’t leave him there forever.

* * *

The final time it happened, Five doesn’t understand why. He hasn’t said anything offensive to her. He’s obediently been following orders and kept quiet about the apocalypse, acting as if it didn’t matter anymore. Yet, here The Boy was, surrounded again by an unending trail of death and destruction in a barren wasteland.

He finds some old notes he graffitied while there. Equation on top of equation littered the wall in front of him. Random notes and doodles painted between the margins.

_Maybe the Handler saw his copy of Vanya’s book? It was filled with notes on how to get back home. Was he acting too nonchalant about everything? Was this some sort of power play? Reminding him that she could drop him here whenever she wants?_

The man reads over the wall, trying to figure out how to travel back for the who-knows-how-manyth time. Lucky for the survivor, Five had a pen in his pocket. He scribbles new numbers everywhere until morning.

It’s winter when The Handler comes back for him. Number Five is more determined than ever to leave.

* * *

Toxic fumes fill the air around him. Rubble falls from demolished buildings. It’s quiet except for the smallest crackles of fires in the distance. A cockroach scatters across the ground. Five’s stomach grumbles. He hasn’t eaten in so long. Desperately, he walks closer to it.

He tries to catch it, but the thing gets lucky and crawls into a thin crack beneath him. The road was damaged and the broken pieces of it were too big for the young man to lift. It makes him furious. He’s alone, and hungry, and just wants _one_ thing to go right for him in the damn apocalypse!

It’s been months. He could time travel forward, but he couldn’t travel back. If he teleports too much he gets tired and fatigued, and he needs to conserve all the energy he could to survive this hell hole. He falls to the ground in exhaustion.

_Why did he have to run out that day?_

Then he wakes up. He’s on a couch inside the still-standing Umbrella Academy. A TV is in front of him playing some movie Five doesn’t know the name of. There’s a blanket covering him. His siblings are asleep in the room with him.

Luther, Diego and Vanya were laying together against the wall, Klaus was sprawled atop a table and Allison rested with all the room’s pillows next to the sofa. They were fine. They were safe. They were alive.

Five clutched the blanket in his fists. His heart is still racing from the nightmare. He remembers going days without food. Without water. He remembers the air being impossible to breath sometimes.

He reminds himself that it was over. He reminds himself that the world didn’t end and that his family stopped it. The Commission is still after them, but they’ve dealt with them fine so far.

The Boy nervously grabs the popcorn on Luther’s lap. The scene on screen is of a desecrated, orange wasteland. He’d change the channel, but doesn’t know where the remote is. It looks too familiar for Five to be comfortable.

He wonders how long he actually spent in the apocalypse. It was apparently 45 years before The Handler took him out of there, but what about when she put him back? Time meant nothing in a world constantly trying to kill you. He stopped counting the days within the first year, only able to guess how much time passed when the weather changed. With the End averted, she can’t drop him there anymore. He knows this. If an apocalypse never happens she can’t send him back to one. Five _knows_ this, yet the anxiety of being sent back is still there.

The former assassin turns away from the TV. He clutches the blanket tighter and closed his eyes. “You’ll be fine,” he tells himself. “She can’t send you back.” He steadies his breathing as he attempts to fall asleep, images of a decaying wasteland continuing to haunt him.


End file.
